This invention relates generally to the electronic filing of documents with governmental agencies, and more particularly to the filing of legal documents over an unsecured network such as the Internet.
An increasing number of governmental agencies allow the electronic filing of legal documents. For example, a number of courts allow legal documents, such as complaints and briefs, to be electronically filed. As another example, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has had an Electronic Trademark Application filing system available since early 1999, and is planning an Electronic Patent Application filing system in the near future.
There are a number of issues with electronic document filing systems. A major issue is security. Since many of these systems use an unsecured wide area network (WAN) such as the Internet for the delivery of the documents, there is legitimate client, agency, and attorney concerns as to the security of the transmitted data comprising these electronic documents. Encryption is one way to address these issues, but it creates a whole new set of issues such as security levels, standards, ease of use, etc.
Another issue with electronic document filing systems is that of authentication. Most paper documents must be signed in order to be effective. Electronic signatures have been suggested and used for electronic filing systems, but these too raise additional issues of verification, standards, ease of use, etc. In some cases, the requirements of electronic signatures have been so great that clients are reluctant to use the electronic document filing systems.
Electronic filing systems of the prior art tend to require a considerable amount of human intervention in formatting, transmitting, and processing the electronic documents. In some instances, it is actually faster to prepare documents for manual, or paper, filing than it is to prepare documents for electronic filing. In addition to sometimes cumbersome requirements, the content of electronic documents are often created from scratch for each electronic filing transaction, eliminating some economies that would be provided by a more automated system.
A still further problem with electronic document filing systems is that they often require immediate payment. For example, some electronic document filing systems require that requisite fees be immediately charged to a credit card. This is a problem with some clients, particularly large corporations, which typically are not set-up for purchases of this type.
There are instances where a client works through multiple levels of representation. For example, a client may have a general counsel who directs a patent counsel to file an electronic document with the USPTO. As another example, a foreign client may instruct a foreign trademark attorney to instruct a U.S. trademark attorney to file a trademark application with the USPTO. It has been difficult to handle these multiple levels of representation in the past with electronic document filing systems, since such systems tend to infer that the client or its immediate representative is the one actually electronically filing the document.